Chutzpah is not Enough

...Dershowitz was onto something...

...Moving to Israel is of little interest to American Jews not already strongly committed to Jewish life...

...It was peculiarly American of him to celebrate what the Old World dismissed as brazenness, and in political terms this has certainly had its dividends...

...This personal cataclysm forces a reappraisal: In his ninth book he inventories the Jewish elements of his and his generation's identity, then works his way toward a prescription for securing Jewish existence into the future...

...The old Boro Park and the tolerant Orthodoxy it represented are only a memory...

...Eventually he also took a pulpit in Boro Park, where, I found out in this book, he spoke at Alan Dershowitz' Bar Mitzvah...

...Orbis Oy, Alan Dershowitz...

...Since the 19th century, traditional Jews have characterized modern times as an age of chutzpah, of impudence...

...This is a position at once very modern in its acceptance of the diversity of Jewish perspectives and voices, and deeply traditional in its insistence that Jews live their lives in relation to those texts, however variously, contrarily...

...After Rabbi AMva and Maimonides and Yehudah HaLevi and Hasidism and the Kabbalah and Yiddish and Ladino, this is it...

...more affectionate than knowing...

...Together these constitute a broad field where today's Jews can discover not only their ancestors but themselves, Dershowitz contends, as they wrestle with the perplexities of contemporary politics, spirituality and morality...

...Indeed, though he doesn't mention it, there are nascent signs of such a renewal in places like New York's Drisha Institute, Washington D.C.'s Jewish Study Center, and Boston's House of Ascending Studies...

...Eastern European ghettos and shtetls, often nostalgically portrayed as bastions of Jewish continuity, grappled with the same pressing concern...

...Rather, the texts offer a means of incorporating Jewish civilization into the fabric of one's adult life...

...Hasidism...

...albeit not always...

...he surveys the chief forms of Jewish experience in America today and finds each of them both essential and lacking...

...What is an anxious Jewish father to do...

...There is, of course, no magic formula for Jewish survival...

...Dershowitz' personal dilemma is that of American Jewry writ large: Survival has been secured, beyond anyone's wildest dreams, yet its ends remain disturbingly ill-defined...

...Unfortunately, for all of its undoubted sincerity, The Vanishing American Jew seems to be part of a new genre, the wordprocessor book, in which old speeches, columns, talks, Op-Eds, articles can be cut and pasted and published with remarkable speed...

...Jewish writers in prewar Europe...

...He made it from Boro Park, in Brooklyn, to a Supreme Court clerkship to the Harvard law faculty to a truly extraordinary career as a legal scholar, advocate for the accused and champion of human rights...

...His annoying excesses, unnerving narcissism and disappointing superficialities notwithstanding, Dershowitz is on the mark regarding the key issues facing American Jews, especially the things they must do to insure not just their continuity but their curiosity about themselves...

...Reviewed by Yehudah Mirsky Contributor, "Economist," "Washington Monthly...

...Even in these increasingly multiculturalist times, there is a bargain in place in America: If you shed your particularities and adopt the cultural mores of low-keyed Protestantism, you will be more or less accepted in society and commerce...

...A tempting offer it is, and many have taken it...

...It has its antecedents in the works of numerous scholars and thinkers of this century (some remembered and many forgotten) who brought Jewish learning into engagement with the ferment and conflict of their times, seeking to achieve a new synthesis...

...In a mere half-century Jews have gone from facing the threat of extermination to succumbing to the danger of indifference...

...Yiddish and Ladino literature...

...He expressed his "happy warrior" persona in Chutzpah, a paean to unapologetic self-assertion, positing it as the polar and redeemed opposite of the Jewish vulnerability that reached its nightmarish apotheosis in the Holocaust...

...But chutzpah is not enough, not as politics and not as identity...

...The Brooklyn neighborhood was then a community of politically moderate, largely American-born Orthodox Zionists...

...A number of chapters still read like the brisk talks they probably were, rather than a reasoned and comprehensive presentation...

...The learning Dershowitz advocates aims to instill that sort of dedication...

...Thus it makes perfect sense that his largest Jewish involvement has been as an archcombatant in the fight against anti-Semitism...

...The analysis of underlying historical and social trends is thin, the discussion of venerable texts often...

...but always lovingly...

...Nonetheless, buried in his argument is the germ of a provocative idea: Judaism as a language whose texts provide a vocabulary and an orientation for moving through time...

...But the present generation of young American Jews is not the first to set off alarms similar to the one sounded by Dershowitz...

...the Talmud...

...A renewal of learning based on a nondenominational approach to Jewish intellectual, economic and organizational resources, he feels, could herald a vital new form of Jewish identity...

...the new Hebrew literature...

...One of them happened to be my grandfather, a Talmudic prodigy who went on to study law, become a professor, and write numerous books and articles on integrating Jewish law and literature into modern democratic society...

...ethical and Kabbalistic writings...

...Disturbingly, that is, for Jewish parents, who sense that something precious, some vital link to the past and to the deeper currents of their lives, is slipping irretrievably away...

...they come to understand them...

...Dershowitz takes stock...

...all by dint of his own raw brilliance, moxie and passion...

...Dershowitz, the crusader for the damned, the defense lawyer to the stars, is in many ways a crystalline exemplar of post-1960s American Jewry...

...battling Soviet jailers, Holocaust deniers and other foes of the Jewish people...

...He does however, suggest a way to deal with the situation, rooted precisely in an appreciation of everything that stands to be lost...

...Social justice and ethics are critical aspects of Judaism, but are shared with people of goodwill of every culture and civilization...

...But Alan Dershowitz learned its lessons well, above all the need for commitment and the wonders of the texts...

...Mostprominent among them were secular Zionism and, for a while, Jewish Socialism...

...And yet, the professor cries, how can one not go on being Jewish...

...because they were about representing something, believing in something, fighting for something, and sometimes dying for something...

...the Bible...

...Now he has reached the stage when grandparenthood is on the horizon, and his thoroughly Americanized son has married a thoroughly Americanized Catholic...

...There is no simple answer, and Dershowitz is honest enough not to try one...

...How can all that magnificent history simply, willfully, be allowed to fade into the thin vapor of McDonald's, Disney and television that is American fin-de-si??cle culture...

...Dershowitz, to put it mildly, is no theologian...

...And not through the conscious rebellion of their children, but perhaps more ominously, through indolence and indifference...

...Those restless decades soon yielded other forms of Jewish identity...

...If non-Jews in past centuries loved them too little, non-Jews now may love them too much...

...By learning he means studying the vast textual riches of Jewish history...

...It has since become a militantly insular Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic enclave, whose turning inward and rejection of the world mirrors in reverse the outward passage of Dershowitz' son and his peers...

...including Shai Agnon, Chaim Grade and Itzik Manger...

...In fact, immigration to America, beyond its material benefits, was both a sign of and a contributor to widespread disaffection from received tradition...

...Orthodoxy, despite its unexpected success at maintaining a robust community, is not a live option for Western intellectuals (and often troubles Orthodox intellectuals, too...

...What he urges is "learning...

...Midrash...

...depict societies being whipped by ideological and class struggle...

...Fighting anti-Semitism is essential to self-esteem as well as to survival, but ultimately it is a negative path to Jewishness, for the Prime Mover is the adversary...

...medieval Jewish law, philosophy and poetry...

...modern thought...